Peace After Paris: Addressing Climate, Conflict, and Development

Author:
Sreya Panuganti

2015 was a historic year for international commitments to sustainable development, climate change action, and new kinds of peacebuilding. For governments and policymakers, now comes the difficult task of living up to those commitments.

Security concerns, like ISIS and a revanchist Russia, tend to dominate people’s attention, but less sensational challenges to stability and economic development are piling up as well, threatening to overwhelm humanitarian budgets and prompting governments to shift funding from development to emergency aid.

It’s important “to reform the system so that the urgent…doesn’t displace the important,” said Nick Mabey, founder and chief executive of the environmental consultancy E3G, at the Wilson Center on May 6. We need to create institutions and processes so that policymakers can “do the medium- to long-term work while the urgent is being managed.”

The United Nations

“There’s no sustainable security without addressing climate and resource issues in future planning,” Mabey said. He pointed to the “1 in 900 year drought” in the Middle East as a background driver of instability, tensions, social unrest, and regional rivalry.

Yet how exactly governments go about addressing climate and resource issues is unclear, despite periodic attention.

The article's full-text is available here.

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